Super Mario 64 is a big holiday game to me. I can’t help it. I associate it with winter and Christmas, and that’s why I replayed it again in December. But this time, I tried to pay attention to certain things.

When you think of liminal spaces, you think of eerie dreamlike locations. Places that are transitional, nowhere you’re meant to be for an extended period of time. Hallways, airport terminals, strange corridors. The in-between areas that are familiar but empty or abandoned, and always devoid of people.

The stranger ones are even more dreamlike, with stairs leading nowhere, uncanny architecture that makes little practical sense, and elements that are familiar but probably shouldn’t be there (like, say, a pool slide that starts from nowhere). They also usually have a 90s or early 00s vibe, which I guess can’t be helped.

It probably wasn’t intentional that many of those old Nintendo 64 or even Playstation-era games ended up becoming liminal. Despite the jump to 3D, the designers’ ambitions were still greater than the hardware, and as exciting as those early 3D worlds were, they were still small. Blocky, contained, and fairly empty.

None of this was much different from the earlier 2D games. Those were all disconnected levels, too, often with pretty weird stuff going on. But the shift into 3D created a new uncanniness, bringing things closer to our dimension, but still not quite right.

The leap from 2D to 3D can’t really be overstated, though, especially when Mario 64 hit the market. It was kind of a revelation. Kiosks at places like Walmart and Sears showed off Mario’s floating head in the main menu, and people would spend time just trying the game out and running around inside the castle. Back then, Super Mario 64 was not uncanny or weird or creepy. Not in my memory. It was pretty magical.

But during my replay, I realized that Mario 64 is not only very liminal, it’s pretty Lynchian, too.

Inside the Castle Walls

Do you remember Josie Packard in Twin Peaks? Spoilers, but her ultimate fate was to become trapped in the wood of the Great Northern Hotel. You could see her there, sometimes, vaguely. Maybe in a dresser knob…

When you first enter Peach’s Castle, you hear that classic theme “Inside the Castle Walls,” then a single loitering Toad informs you that everyone’s been trapped inside them. It’s up to Mario to go room by room and jump into large paintings to collect stars and ultimately defeat Bowser, breaking the spell.

Each room is mostly just another empty space, sometimes with a thematic element (like the wall-sized aquariums in the Jolly Roger Bay room). But the open secret here is that Mario 64 doesn’t just include a few weird liminal spaces. The entirety of the game is one big dreamlike liminal space.

Look at Peach’s Castle from the outside. There is no road leading here. There are no exits. Mario arrives via a warp pipe to a royal land that exists completely disconnected from anything else. The levels are pretty much the same, being small disjointed dreamworlds that can also sometimes feel pretty claustrophobic.

The castle itself is broken up into a series of rooms that serve no purpose. There’s a foyer, but open the door to level 1, Bob-omb Battlefield, and it’s just a room with a painting. They all are.

Down in the basement, you find a dungeon-like area with standing water, and then a room with nothing but a metallic pool in the center. Upstairs? More empty rooms with paintings. That’s really it. There’s nowhere in this castle where anyone is meant to be.

One room upstairs is very narrow, but seems big because there’s a room-length mirror all along the opposite wall. The trick here is that the mirror shows you a painting on the wall that isn’t really there. Look even closer, and the aesthetic seems a little familiar.

The patterned floors and ceilings, the red carpet, the pillars (but without statues). It’s not an exact match, but Peach must have employed the decorator of the Black Lodge, or at least someone familiar with their work.

(And I know, this aesthetic dates back to Super Mario Bros. 3 and maybe even 2, which also took place inside a dream, both pre-dating Twin Peaks…hmm.)

Through the Looking Glass

In another area down in the basement, you’ll find a room with two pillars surrounded by water. That’s POOLS circa 1996. There’s nothing much more liminal than that.

Mario 64 also references Alice In Wonderland at least once, not counting all the mushrooms the series is known for. MIPS the Rabbit runs around in the dungeon, and if you catch him, you get a star after he says “Unhand me, brute! I’m late, so late! I have a date! I cannot be late for tea!”

And then there’s Tiny-Huge Island, where you can jump in either very big or very small. Leaping through paintings, which ripple like water, feels a lot like taking an adventure through the looking glass.

My favorite level overall (don’t ask me why) is Wet-Dry World, which also features the most claustrophobic space in the game, in my opinion. There’s a hidden village you swim to through a narrow passage, and you can drain the water in there and run around. But if you flood it again, you end up in this very claustrophobic space that just makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.

The longer you play, the more bizarre and abstract the levels get, too. Until, by the end, you’re riding a magic carpet on a rainbow through strange buildings above the clouds.

Here’s the fun part: While I was working on this, a new wild YouTube video appeared called “Exploring the Liminal Spaces in Super Mario 64.” In that video, Qwack covers almost everything I wanted to about liminal spaces. The quiet empty rooms, the long hallways, Wet-Dry World, the two pillars, the way almost every level is just a floating box in a sea of nothing. And let’s not forget the endless stairway. The game’s liminal vibe is clearly in the air again.

A lot of the modern mystique of Super Mario 64 comes from videos like this and creepypasta like “Every copy of Mario 64 is personalized.” It makes sense. Looking back, the game is filled with uncanny vibes and dream logic.

I don’t think Super Mario 64 is a creepy game, though. To me, it’s more cozy. It exists in this weird space in the past, and playing it takes me back there. But the past itself is a liminal space, somewhere we’re not meant to be anymore. Going back can sometimes feel a little strange!